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Trail of feathers

THE ancestors of Tyrannosaurus rex had primitive feathers, reports Xing Xu’s team at the Institute for Vertebrate Palaeontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, which recently uncovered the most complete fossil yet of an early kind of tyrannosauroid.

The dinosaur, dubbed Dilong paradoxus, was about 1.5 metres long and lived around 130 million years ago – 60 million years before T. rex. The fossil has protofeathers on its tail and jaw (Nature, vol 431, p 680). Because closely related dinosaurs had feathers, researchers expected to find them on early tyrannosauroids.

The protofeathers are thought to have provided insulation. But T. rex itself …